"Spehro Pefhany" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 16:36:10 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Ignoramus17663" wrote in message
...
A long time ago, near Moscow, I was working on a fall potato harvest
with my class, and one girl found an unexploded mortar shell from
WWII, I would say 3-4 lb weight.

I doubt the following statement from Wikipedia:

It has been estimated that, for every square metre of territory on the
front from the coast to the Swiss border, a tonne of explosives
fell. One shell in every four[2] (some sources say one in every
three[3]) did not detonate. The Canadian National Vimy Memorial Site
is notable for supposedly having one unexploded munition for every
square metre.

Sounds a little excessive.

I punched the numbers and, if Switzerland were included, it's 9 trillion
tons of explosives. I think somebody sneezed when they were placing the
decimal point. g

Maybe they calculated 'the front' as being 100m wide or something like
that.

Maybe. I wasn't sure how to interpret it. The 9 trillion tons counts all of
Europe, so it's probably inflated by more than half, because Switzerland and
some other countries don't count.

Or, maybe they're just counting the area swept by the Western Front. That's
a small fraction of the total geography of the war zones.

Still, that's a hell of a lot of bang-bang.

--
Ed Huntress